Captive
by Amicitia Revenant
Summary: We are all prisoners of our past, our bias, our fear. But for a twist of fate, things could have ended almost before they began. AU from the opening episodes of 2k3. Warning for violent deaths.
1. Chapter 1

"Lost your job, boss sent killer robots after you, what else could go wrong?" she laughed nervously.

Then her foot struck something in the dark, and her head struck something else as she fell, and she collapsed face-first into the putrid water.

* * *

She woke slowly from the weirdest dream. She'd been at work - a normal dream, but not her favorite one; why couldn't she ever dream of George Clooney? - debugging Mouser code, when suddenly the robots started doing things she was sure she hadn't programmed them to do. She had run away from the small group of test robots, only to discover that her boss had a secret warehouse of thousands of the things hidden under the lab.

Okay. Weird, but straightforwardly related to the stress of the job. Stockman _had_ been demanding a lot from her lately. She took a breath and let the dream go.

But - then there had been that other part. The Mousers had chased her into a sewer, of all places, she had never been in a sewer in her life, and everything had been slimy and wet and gross. Where had _that_ come from?

Somewhere, something was dripping steadily. She listened to the sound of water on water, and groaned.

She must have been hearing that all night. The bathroom was flooding, and instead of being woken by it, she'd just had a bad dream about sewers.

All right. Time to get up, call a plumber, let Stockman know she would be a little late to work. She deserved the time off anyway.

She tried to get up, and found she couldn't move very far.

Panic began to set in as she opened her eyes. A niggling sense was beginning to warn her that things were not as they seemed.

She was lying on concrete in a room she had never seen before. It was dimly lit by bare fluorescent bulbs dangling from the ceiling. The room was filled with garbage: rusty mechanical parts, empty food packages, some huge jugs of who-knew-what. There was broken furniture and children's toys and small appliances of every kind. On top of the pile lay a Mouser, its head completely caved in. There was hardly a bare patch of floor, except for a wide semicircle around her, which had been swept clean.

She was chained to the wall.

And somewhere, something was dripping.

She shivered and pulled herself up to a sitting position. Her clothes were officially ruined and the rest of her probably didn't look so great either. She was hungry and in pain and she probably should have been afraid, but some part of her dimly recognized that she had switched into survival mode, and fear would be delayed until it was safe to dissolve into a sobbing mess.

She looked around again. Doorways and corridors led off into other parts of the space, which she couldn't picture in her mind as being anywhere but underground. Maybe it was because the last place she had been was underground - she was beginning to accept that being chased into the sewers by killer Mousers had not been a dream - and her logical brain demanded some level of consistency in her spatial experience.

But she certainly hadn't been _here_ before. What had happened while she was unconscious?

"Hello?" she called tentatively.

As soon as she said it, she drew back against the wall. Maybe that had been a bad idea. Her survival mode didn't get a lot of practice.

She could hear something moving around the corner. There was a heavy shadow against the wall, and then a figure emerged.

Immediately she could tell that something wasn't right, but any theory she ever would have formulated was proved wrong as soon as the - _thing_ stepped into the light.

It was green and powerfully built and decidedly not human. Not any kind of creature she had ever heard of. Not something that should _exist_ , her brain told her. Something that big could not possibly be running around New York without being known to science.

It didn't look friendly as it approached her.

"Oh my god," she squeaked, scrambling back against the wall. "Ohhh my god. You are not real. This is not real. I was dreaming. I am still dreaming. I'd like to wake up now."

The creature ignored her. It probably didn't understand what she was saying. It was sure-footed, somehow managing to find floor under all the detritus, and it was _silent_.

This was officially the weirdest, most terrifying dream she had ever had. Some part of her brain regretted to inform her that this was not a dream, but she told it to shut up, because to contemplate the alternative would be to descend into madness.

The creature reached the edge of the cleared semicircle, and crouched, watching her.

"What are you?" she asked, as though it would do any good.

The creature leaned slowly forward, stretching out its wrinkly neck. It balanced itself on three splayed fingers, one of them attached in a thumb-like arrangement, she noticed. Its nostrils twitched as it regarded her, but only languidly; it didn't seem to rely on a sense of smell. Its eyes were large, brown, intelligent.

"What. Are. Youuu?" it croaked, and she jerked back so hard she nearly knocked herself out again.

The creature drew back warily at her sudden motion, retreating to just beyond her reach. "Yeah," she said. Her voice was soft and shaky. "What are you."

The creature watched her, blinking its huge eyes just infrequently enough to be unsettling. Then it rose to its feet and moved away into the darkness.

For a moment she sat, stunned. Then her survival brain remembered it was supposed to be in charge here, and prompted her to look at the chains.

They weren't especially strong, and looked as though they might have been stolen from a playground swing set. Unfortunately, she wasn't especially strong either, and attempting to break the metal links got her nowhere.

The chains were looped through a pair of metal handcuffs whose provenance she tried not to think about. What was more important was that this arrangement was clearly the work of a sophisticated intelligence. No animal would do anything like this. There must be a human here.

"Hello!" she called again. "My name is April O'Neil! I'm - I'm a United States citizen!" She didn't know if that would do her any good, but having just lost her job as lab assistant to a prestigious scientist, it was all the credentials she had. "Hello!" she shouted, her voice ringing off the concrete walls.

The echoes had hardly died away when the creature appeared again, moving faster this time. "Oh no no no," she managed, before it was on top of her. It hauled her to her feet by her shirtfront - _It has opposable thumbs, it's **strong** _ \- and slapped her.

Her cheek stung, and she stared at the creature, mouth agape. It stared back, its eyes huge and gold.

 _It wasn't the same one._

She had barely gotten her head around the most basic meaning of this thought - she hadn't even scratched the surface of the implications - when another of the creatures showed up in a doorway. Whether it was the first, or a third, she couldn't tell at this distance. It made a series of chirping and squeaking noises; the one with the golden eyes grunted and dropped her to the ground. Before she could say anything, both faded away into the shadows.

She lay in a heap, panting, trying to remain still and silent. She didn't want to provoke the creatures again. Her survival brain announced that it was not at all prepared for this and was submitting its letter of resignation, but she refused to let it get off that easily.

The dripping of water was like a clock, but there was no way to tell time in the subterranean chamber. If she'd had her cell phone with her when she fled the lab, she didn't have it now. She lay on the floor for what felt like hours. A part of her that had read too many novels told her that the cold should be seeping into her bones, but in fact it was pleasantly warm in the room.

After a long time, she examined her bonds again. She studied the lock of the handcuffs, but didn't have anything to pick it with. She searched the length of the chain and could not find a weak link. She pulled the loops slowly through each other but there was no way to pull them apart. She looked at where the chains were attached to the wall, and found that the locking rings were sunk into the concrete with heavy screws.

Her gaze swung outward to the detritus that filled the room. Just beyond the edge of the cleared space was a flat piece of dark gray plastic - a segment of racetrack for the toy cars that were scattered around the room. If she could reach it, it might be good enough as a screwdriver.

She began to inch towards her target, trying to watch all the corners of the room at once. The creatures moved so silently, she couldn't be sure they weren't watching her even now.

She had more reach with her feet than with her hands. She turned around, stretching towards the track piece with the toe of her sneaker. If she accidentally kicked it away, she knew, her chance would be gone.

She aimed to hook her foot behind the empty bag of potato chips the track segment was lying half on top of, to pull it closer to her. Slowly, slowly, trying not to let the bag crinkle and alert her captors that she was up to something, she angled into position.

She could just barely reach. She lifted the foil bag from behind. Stretched as far as she could go, she had no leverage, and even the thin piece of plastic seemed impossibly heavy. She willed her ankle to lift it anyway. A millimeter at a time, the racetrack tipped up, and then slid towards her across the smooth floor.

She looked around - the coast was clear - and hurriedly scraped the track towards her with her heel. As soon as she could, she snatched it up with her hands, snapping off the plastic tabs that would hold it in place against an adjoining segment.

She spun around and jammed the track into the slots of the anchor screw. The plastic was flimsy; the anchor, not so much. The screw's threading had to give way before the cheap toy did.

She turned her makeshift screwdriver. The plastic twisted in her hand. She adjusted her grip, pinching either side of the very end of the racetrack, and tried again.

Whoever had installed the locking rings was strong, and had screwed them down all the way. It wasn't going to be easy to get them out.

April glanced over her shoulder, and put her weight into another turn of the screw. It was her only game plan.

She didn't know how long she worked at it; every time she felt ready to give up, she thought the screw turned just a tiny fraction, and she redoubled her efforts.

She tried not to think about the fact that there were four screws. She'd thought about it just long enough to test each one of them, and they were all as firmly embedded in the concrete as the first one she had tried.

Absorbed as she was in the effort, her survival brain still grudgingly did its job by alerting her that someone was coming. She spun away from the wall and dropped to the floor, sitting on the precious piece of plastic.

Two of the creatures came into the room, and then three - _there **are** three_ \- and then _four_. She held her breath, unable to suppress the image of thousands of Mousers on the underground assembly line. She had thought there were only half a dozen prototypes. She didn't plan to make the same mistake with these creatures.

"How many of you _are_ there?" she breathed.

The creatures moved across the room like ghosts, as though they weren't even on the same plane of existence as the heap of junk. Her eyes darted to the chip bag, then she forced herself to look away. If the creatures noticed that anything had been disturbed, they gave no sign.

They came towards her, arranging themselves along the edges of the cleared space. She could have reached them, could have hooked their ankles with her own - but then what? They were stronger than her, they were obviously heavier, and they had already shown they could be aggressive.

They were making more of those soft squeaking noises as they looked at her. It sounded almost like birdsong, yet had the cadence of a conversation. She could have sworn they were taking turns.

And then one of them said, "You. Man."

The squeaking had stopped, and April had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being addressed. Addressed in a meaningful way, even. Animal intelligence was not her area of expertise, but that hadn't sounded like imitative speech. "You can talk."

"You man," the creature repeated, and it dawned on her that it might actually expect a response.

"No," she said. "No, I'm not."

She must have been anthropomorphizing, because the creature seemed to not only understand this answer, but to be unsatisfied by it. "Youuu-man," it tried again.

 _Human._ It was saying _human_.

" _Oh_ ," she said. "Yes. That I am."

The creatures conferred again, in their strange language. She knew she shouldn't even let herself think of it as a _language_ , but she couldn't help it. It was impossible to not perceive the creatures as intelligent. Maybe it was their human-like postures and gestures. Maybe it was the total lack of evidence that anyone _other_ than them had brought her here and chained her up like this. Maybe it was rapid-onset Stockholm Syndrome. She tried to remind herself to be scientific about all of this, but so far rationality had proved to be a pretty poor approach to today's events.

And then the creatures were speaking English again. To each other.

"What do with it?" asked one. It crouched, and the others followed suit. As they came down to her level, she could see it was the brown-eyed one that had spoken. The golden-eyed one was to its left; to its right was one with blue eyes. The fourth, with calm grey eyes, crouched at the far left of the line, just in front of where she had stolen the track piece from. She tried not to show how the plastic slat was digging into her butt.

"Eat," the blue-eyed creature suggested. April could not classify the expressions that came onto its companions' faces as anything other than thoughtfully appraising, and she did not like it one bit.

She sprang into action, snatching the track piece from underneath herself and striking out with it. The broken, jagged edge swung at the blue-eyed creature's soft-looking neck. She didn't want to inflict that much damage, but she didn't know where else to aim: their chests were protected by a type of organic armor, like an armadillo's plates, and the skin on most of their bodies looked rubbery and tough.

Her aim didn't matter; the strike never landed. She found her wrist caught in the firm grip of the brown-eyed one. She hadn't even seen it move.

It plucked the makeshift weapon from her hand as though her strength were no more than that of a child, and showed it to the blue-eyed creature. The sharp chirps that accompanied this gesture sounded for all the world like a reprimand.

The blue-eyed one hung its head. The one with brown eyes turned the other way and chirped what sounded like a command. Her attempts to break its grip while its attention was elsewhere were met with effortless resistance.

The gray-eyed creature moved across the room, picked up the crushed Mouser, and brought it to the brown-eyed one, who tossed aside the track piece in order to accept the new object. The brown-eyed one studied the robot for a moment, then held it out to April. "Yours?"

"Yes," she said, and was met with angry hisses from all the creatures. "I mean, no. My boss invented the Mousers. He hired me to write code. I was programming them to find and retrieve objects. I had no idea about the override routine…" She trailed off. "You don't know what any of that means."

"Understand," the creature said, and even if April had believed it, she never would have predicted what happened next. Slowly, the creature released her wrist, set the Mouser on the floor, and shifted into a kneeling position. "Teach me?" it asked.

She felt like she'd been hit in the head from the inside, and she slumped to the floor, unconscious.

* * *

When she came to, the brown-eyed creature was still sitting near her, but the others had gone.

"Apriloneil," it said, as soon as it saw she was awake. It pronounced her name as one word.

"Uh. Yeah." The chains clinked as she reached up to rub her head. "Somehow that's still me." The creature didn't seem to understand her sense of humor, so she tried again. "What about you? Do you have a name?"

"Donatello," the creature replied, in its halting way. "Them - my brothers. Live here. Found you…" He - she couldn't go on calling it _it_ \- made a vague outward gesture. "Out there."

"And chained me to a wall?" she asked, raising a brow.

"Human," he said, as if that explained everything. He looked over his shoulder and made a loud series of squeaks.

"And you're obviously not," April said, when Donatello faced her again. "What _are_ you?"

"Hard… hard story," he said. "Not now." He nudged the Mouser forward, its deeply-treaded feet scraping across the floor. "You teach."

"You want me to teach you how to program a robot," she said flatly, and received an emphatic nod in response.

Another of the creatures emerged from a doorway, dropped down in front of her, and offered her a steaming pile of meat wrapped in a greasy newspaper.

"Michelangelo," said Donatello, and April mentally attached that name to the one with blue eyes.

"And what's that?" she asked, pointing to the meat.

"Small… small animal," Donatello tried, and he made a little hopping movement with his fist.

"A rabbit?"

"Rabbit," Michelangelo agreed. He imitated the hopping movement, then pounced on his fist with his other hand, demonstrating how the poor creature wound up as April's next meal.

Donatello smacked Michelangelo in the head. "Cooks good," he said, and April could have sworn there was a tone of apology in his voice. "Otherwise, fucking stupid."

The swear, along with the casualness with which it was uttered, took her aback. She accepted the food and ate a little. It wasn't bad.

"The others?" she asked.

"Raphael," Donatello replied. "Sorry for hit. And Leonardo. Back later."

"Who named you?"

Both of the creatures looked at the floor. "Father," Donatello said, and no amount of rationality could deny the sadness hanging from the word. "Dead. Long time."

"There are no people here, are there," she said.

Donatello shook his head. "No human. Never human."

She was about to ask something else, but her brain was stuck on the way he had said _never_. "Your father…"

"Not human," he repeated emphatically. He looked up, his gaze hard. "Our story. Not for you." He laid a hand on the Mouser. "You teach now."

"Yeah, about that," she said, trying to look calm even though Donatello had just as good as admitted to kidnapping her and chaining her to a wall. "Also kind of private information. Even though I'm pretty sure I don't work for Dr. Stockman anymore, I could still get in a lot of trouble for sharing trade secrets."

The two creatures stared at her blankly.

"Not allowed to teach you," she said slowly. "Okay?"

Not okay, apparently. Donatello's gaze darkened a shade further. "Teach me," he demanded again. "Or -" He pointed to her, then drew a line down his chest with one finger.

For a moment she didn't know how to interpret the gesture. Then: "Are you threatening to _dissect_ me?"

He shrugged. "Want to learn from you. Don't care what."

She sat back, kicking herself for ever having thought of Donatello as nearly human. He wasn't, and she should never have begun to trust him as though he was. "How do I know you won't dissect me _after_ I teach you about the Mousers?"

He seemed to like that idea a little too much.

"Okay," she said, handing the barely-touched packet of food to Michelangelo. "I'm out of here. Unchain me now."

Donatello shook his head.

"What am I going to do?" April demanded. "I'm half your size."

"Tried to stab me," Michelangelo pointed out.

That was true. April was a little proud of her racetrack shiv, even though it hadn't worked at all.

"Well, I'm out of weapons," she said. "I just want to go home."

The two creatures didn't seem inclined to consider that request, so it was just as well that at that moment, one of the others arrived. Virtually ignoring her presence, he crossed to the two seated before her and delivered some sort of long report. Only when he was finished did he turn his grey eyes to study her.

"Leonardo," Donatello said to her, in case she had forgotten this one's name. "Went to find…" He trailed off, and the three conferred again in a rapid sequence of chirps and squeaks.

"Went to Mouser place," Michelangelo said, when they had reached some sort of consensus. "Found many. Hundreds-hundreds. What for?"

"I don't know," April replied. "I thought there were only six. I just found out today that Stockman has a factory where he's making thousands of them. I don't know what he's planning, but it can't be anything good."

Michelangelo turned to say something to his brothers, and her eyes widened. "You're not stupid," she said to him, when he was finished. "You speak English better than they do."

He grinned at her. His next sentence obviously cost him a great deal of effort, but it was nothing short of astonishing.

"They - don't … _appreciate_ … my - genius."

It was at about this point that her own language skills virtually abandoned her. "My god." They all stared at her curiously. "I - I don't know what you are or where you've been hiding, and your social skills are seriously lacking, but you are _smart_." She looked each of them in their large, intelligent eyes. "Please. I just want to go home and be safe and pretend none of this ever happened."

"We want safe too," Michelangelo said. He passed the rabbit meat to Donatello, so he could reach for the Mouser and offer it to her. "Mouser wrecked our home. Afraid of more. Help us stop them."

She took the battered robot slowly. "You mean the place didn't look like this before?"

Michelangelo looked embarrassed at the question. "Show it?" he asked his brothers. Donatello looked up at Leonardo, and after a moment Leonardo nodded.

"Don't run," Donatello said, as he leaned forward. "Don't want to hurt."

"Yeah, okay," she said, deciding not to mention how just a few minutes ago he'd seemed very interested in the idea of dissecting her.

She couldn't see what he did to the handcuffs, but in a moment they popped open. He stood and, to her great surprise, offered her a hand up. She declined to take it.

None of them touched her once she was on her feet, but they kept her closely surrounded, guiding her down a corridor and into another room. The fourth creature - the one who had struck her, Raphael - was kneeling on the floor in a pile of rubble. There was a gaping hole in the wall, but not all of the debris was from that. Among the wreckage she could see splinters of wood, shards of glass, and even torn ribbons of paper. Scattered across it all were broken and disabled Mousers, some of them even more thoroughly crushed than the one in the other room, some lying in pieces.

Raphael looked over his shoulder, growling when he saw her. He got to his feet, and she noticed, as she hadn't before, that his leg was heavily bandaged. " _You_ \- did this," he gritted out.

She was pretty sure he was about to leap on her and dismember her - interfering with Donatello's hoped-for dissection, probably - but Leonardo stepped into his path and talked him down with a smooth series of chirps.

"Mouser ate wall," Michelangelo murmured, by way of explanation. "Ate Father's shrine. Ate Raph's leg."

"I - I'm sorry," was all she could think to say. "I didn't know they could do that."

The words were useless, and probably no one could hear them over Raphael's howling. Distantly, she noticed that none of the other creatures seemed bothered by the manic behavior. She found herself shrinking back against Michelangelo. She had no reason to believe that _he_ wouldn't hurt her – he had, after all, suggested eating her – but he was still the sanest being in the room, and in her desperation for reassurance she instinctively moved towards him.

"I'll help, I'll help," she heard herself saying. "Just please don't let him kill me."

"Won't kill you," Michelangelo told her, before adding: "Leo might."

"Leo…?"

He smiled, and it seemed wholly inappropriate for the situation. "It's always the silent ones."

He led her out of the room. As Leonardo calmed Raphael, Michelangelo made Donatello disappear with a quiet word, and proceeded to ply April with food and tantalizing pieces of his story.

They called themselves Turtles, and as soon as he said the word, the resemblance was obvious to her. There were only four of them, and they had always lived beneath the streets of New York. The father whose shrine they had tended with so much dedication had raised them and cared for them until his untimely death; he was neither human nor Turtle, though Michelangelo wouldn't say what he was.

They had learned English from eavesdropping on the streets and from TV. They had TV because Donatello was a technological genius. They took care of themselves through scavenging and trapping, they feared humans, and they only wanted to be left alone.

They didn't intend to let her leave.

"Can't let you go," Michelangelo explained. "You would tell about us."

"I wouldn't," she said, but he didn't seem to believe her. "What do you plan to do with me, then, after I help you with the Mousers?"

"Probably kill you." He pushed a plastic bucket of surprisingly fresh and delicious fruit towards her, with a precise and almost gentle gesture. "Sorry."

After feeding her, Michelangelo let her clean up in a bathroom that was nicer than the one she had at home. It was warm, richly tiled, and furnished with both a generously-sized shower stall and a frankly enormous bathtub.

She could tell that one or another of the Turtles was guarding the door at all times. She didn't feel the least bit bad for making them wait a long time. When she finally emerged, Michelangelo was leaning against the wall. It was becoming obvious that he was running interference for her, playing good cop, trying to secure her help through carrots rather than sticks.

"I know what you're doing," she said, but he only looked at her innocently. "I'm tired," she tried instead, and he showed her to a small room with a pile of blankets on the floor.

After that she was left alone. She didn't intend to fall asleep, but she couldn't stay awake.


	2. Chapter 2

When she came back to her senses, the underground complex was silent. She was still alone, and no one had handcuffed her in her sleep.

Rolling to her feet, she padded to the door as quietly as possible and felt for the knob in the pitch blackness. It was unlocked.

She leaned against the wall, trying to remember the layout of the rooms. She only had one chance to find the exit. If she failed, the escape attempt surely wouldn't make the creatures feel any more kindly towards her. Of course, they were already planning to kill her, so she didn't have much to lose.

Drawing a breath, she opened the door and crept out into the hallway. To the right, as far as she knew, everything was sealed off. To the left, she could access the room with the hole in the wall. With luck - at least, for certain definitions of _luck_ \- she could get out into the sewer from there, find a ladder, and get home.

She had barely gotten two steps before she tripped over something big.

This time, at least, she protected her head on the way down. But a moment later a hand descended on her ankle.

She struggled; surely if she could get free, she could outrun something that called itself a Turtle. But getting free was easier said than done.

A match flared; the wavering flame travelled to light a candle. Through the flickering glow, she squinted at her captor.

Leonardo. The silent one.

As calm as ever, he snuffed the match, then met her gaze and pointed back towards the room she had come out of. In response, she flailed her leg.

"I changed my mind," she bit out. "I'm sorry for what happened, but I'm not going to help you if you're going to kill me anyway. Let me go."

He didn't speak; she realized she didn't know if he could. Maybe he didn't even understand her.

He stood up and dragged her across the floor, carefully skirting the flame. She fought, but she was nowhere near a match for his strength. She thought about grabbing the candle, but there was nothing flammable here except for the clothes she was wearing, and attempting to burn the Turtle seemed unlikely to do anything but enrage him.

Before she could think of any other plans, she was unceremoniously thrown back into the room, and the door slammed behind her. She pounded on it, but it wouldn't budge. She screamed but got no answer. When her throat was too sore to go on, she crawled miserably into the pile of dirty blankets, and cried herself to sleep.

* * *

The next day, the Turtles didn't seem in the mood to take any chances. Leonardo kicked her out of bed, cuffed her before she knew what was happening, and dragged her out into the main room. Despite her profanity-laden protests he chained her to the wall again, and then left her alone with Donatello and Michelangelo. For a long time, the three of them sat in sullen silence.

"Why don't you just go destroy all the Mousers?" she asked finally. "You seem to be good at that."

"Too many," Michelangelo replied. "And Raph hurt now, can't fight." Donatello added a comment, and his brother translated for him. "Want to make the Mouser fight for us. Send it back, carrying something, destroy everything."

April didn't have the energy to be astonished that Donatello had come up with such a plan. "Do you happen to have some very powerful explosives and a remote detonator?"

The answer, once Donatello understood the question, was no.

"Then you would have to program the Mouser to self-destruct. It wouldn't be powerful enough to destroy the whole factory, but if you detonated it in the right position, it could set off a chain reaction that would wipe out everything. Or nearly everything."

Another round of translation, and Donatello indicated that he liked the idea.

"But to hack into the Mouser, you would need a computer. Do you have one of those?"

No, he didn't. But he seemed to have something else in mind. "Have computer at Mouser place?"

"Yes, of course."

"Will steal one," Donatello said, and abruptly the interview was over.

"The Mousers haven't come back," April said to Michelangelo, before he walked away. "Why not?"

"Don't know," he replied. "Not taking chances."

A short time later, she saw Leonardo and Donatello head down the hallway that she now suspected led to whatever they used for a front door. In the hours that followed, Raphael occasionally prowled across the room, snarling but keeping his distance. April, for her part, sat against the wall and didn't talk to anyone.

When Leonardo and Donatello returned, they came directly to her. Kneeling on the floor, Donatello set down a laptop and exactly the right cables for a productive hacking session.

"Teach me."

She tried to look unimpressed, despite the Turtle's success in retrieving the right supplies. "Have you ever used a computer before?"

He shook his head.

"Do you know how to write any code?"

Another shake.

"I spent four years of college learning how to do this. I'm not going to teach you in an afternoon."

A flash of anger came into Donatello's face, but a sharp word from Leonardo chased it away. "You do." He studied her warily. "No tricks."

It occurred to her that she could program the Mouser to do anything, and the Turtles wouldn't know the difference until it was too late. They were giving her the keys to the kingdom with this stolen laptop. Then again, they'd left her in an unlocked room and she had completely failed to turn the situation to her advantage.

"No tricks," she agreed, even though she knew they wouldn't believe her.

Donatello watched her every move as she connected the computer to the Mouser - he pulled the power cord across the floor to plug it in for her - booted up the machine, and began to work.

Pretty soon he was sitting next to her, and then practically leaning on her, like an overgrown child. It occurred to her that she did not know his age.

At first she worked diligently, jumping into code modules and opening a side window to sketch out pseudocode. After a while, she calmly typed _GIANT TURTLES ARE BUTTCLOWNS_ into her notes file.

Donatello didn't react.

He couldn't read.

After that she grew bolder. She wrote some irrelevant code, then searched for an internet connection while waiting for the routine to compile. If she could email someone… well, she didn't know exactly what she would tell them, but the general idea seemed like a good one.

No connections were found. She supposed underground complexes had lousy wireless reception.

She clicked back over to the code window, and suddenly she knew what she wanted to do. The code came slowly at first, and then faster, her fingers flying over the keyboard. She had almost forgotten that a giant turtle was watching over her shoulder when her elbow cracked painfully against his armor plating.

"Ow," she whined, rubbing the injured joint, but Donatello only looked at her balefully. "What, like that was _my_ fault? Give me a little space."

He backed off marginally, and it flashed into her mind that she should ask for more. "Would you bring me a glass of water? Coding makes me thirsty."

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but rolled to his feet and padded off towards the kitchen. None of the others were around, and April seized the opportunity to enact the most important step of her plan.

When Donatello came back he made her stand up so he could search her for more stolen makeshift weapons. He found none, and only then did he let her have the water.

She drank, he seemed satisfied, and then it was back to work. A few hours later she had a clean compile and was ready to test it out.

"Okay," she said. "Let's see if we can get this little guy on his feet."

She carefully selected a different routine from the one she had just completed, and commanded it to execute.

The Mouser's pilot light came on, blinking and then steady. Its visual processors whirred to life; it surveyed its surroundings, then activated its stabilizers to get upright. Despite the huge dent in its head, it was able to operate its jaw servos as it went through its start-up routine.

Donatello pulled back warily, eying the robot and then April. The Mouser took a few steps, and when it showed no inclination to attack anyone, the Turtle leaned forward again, obviously fascinated.

"Pretty neat, right?" April said.

"You… are smart," Donatello said, and this time his speech was slow not because the words were hard, but because they represented a new idea.

"Uh, yeah," April said. "I only graduated top of the class from NYU." She knew this would mean nothing to him, but anyway he wasn't listening. He was following the Mouser around as it experimentally scaled the piles of junk. Only after half a circuit of the room did he seem to remember that this was only the first stage of his plan.

"Leo?" he called through a doorway, and in a moment the other Turtle appeared. They conversed for a while, seeming to discuss what to do with the now-functional robot. April paid close attention, and noticed that Leonardo was nearly silent in this other language as well. He didn't seem less fluent than his brothers - not that she had any reasonable grounds on which to base this conclusion - he simply used his words sparingly.

"Send now," Donatello said, without preamble, when he and his brother had reached an agreement. He crossed his arms and looked down at her, still sitting on the floor with the computer in her lap. "Destroy Mouser place. If trick… goodbye Apriloneil."

She swallowed hard, and launched the untested routine.


	3. Chapter 3

It was an overcast day in the North Precinct and Officer Eastman had come on duty with a bad feeling in his stomach.

So far, though, his stomach had been wrong. The day hadn't been dull - it never was in Midtown - but it hadn't been unusual either. There had been a couple of traffic stops, some stolen property reports that seemed to be developing into a pattern, and another street brawl on Purple Dragon turf.

Somebody really needed to be doing something about these gang wars, Eastman thought to himself. _Well_ , he reflected, _somebody is. And I just arrested him._

"Name?" asked the officer on desk duty.

The handcuffed vigilante stood up straight as he answered. He was tall, muscular, and kind of a lunatic; it hadn't been fun to take him down. "Casey Jones."

" _Real_ name?"

"Arnold," he muttered, his steely blue eyes darting away.

"Seized these weapons from him, Jenn," Eastman said, hoisting a golf bag over the desk. It contained a baseball bat, a tennis racket, and various other sports paraphernalia. As he passed the bag across, one of the items slipped out and clattered to the floor.

"That ain't a weapon, it's a hockey stick," Jones said. "Don't you know what hockey is, you hosebags?"

"Keep talking like that and you won't get it back any time soon," Eastman's partner said as he led the other arrested man forward.

"Name?" Jenn asked again.

"Dragon Face," replied the suspect, and Eastman couldn't help rolling his eyes.

" _Real_ name?"

But the self-proclaimed Dragon Face wasn't listening. He was looking in the other direction, a strange expression on his face. "What the heck is that thing?"

Whatever it was, Eastman had never seen it in the station house before. Nor anywhere else, for that matter. It had a big head that he might have described as football-shaped, except that it featured a pair of nasty-looking jaws and a massive dent. The head was attached to a cylindrical body by a short neck, and the whole contraption was standing on two clawed feet.

Before anyone could venture an answer to Dragon Face's question, the thing opened its jaws and started honking.

"Bomb Squad!" Jenn shouted into her communicator. "Bomb Squad, we have a potential attack in the booking room. Repeat, potential explosive device in the booking room!"

Dragon Face was trying to take cover behind the desk, Jones looked ready to tackle the walking bomb, and Eastman was trying to remember if he'd said "I love you" to his wife that morning, when the honking stopped. At the same moment, the small protrusion on top of the device's head lit up, and suddenly a three-dimensional image of a woman's head was projected into the middle of the room.

"Help," said the flickering image in a tinny voice. "My name is April O'Neil. I'm being held prisoner. This is not a joke. Follow the robot; it will lead you to me."

After a brief pause, the message repeated. When it was finished, the light blinked out, and the robot stood inert.

"What a babe," Jones commented.

Eastman glanced at his partner, as the Bomb Squad officers belatedly rushed into the room. "What do you think, Pete?"

"I guess we'd better investigate, Kev." He held up a hand to the arriving technicians. "It's all right, guys, we'll take this."

"Can't let you do that, officers," said the squad's leader. "Once a threat is called, protocol says we have to check it out."

"All right," Laird replied. "Make it quick while we finish booking these guys; it's related to a potential hostage situation."

The squad leader gave him an odd look, but didn't question the order as he directed his team to get to work.

"No signs of explosives," he reported less than thirty minutes later, when Jones and Dragon Face had been taken away to the holding cells. "Look at this, though." He turned the still-immobile robot over to show the two officers a logo printed on the bottom of its foot. "That's Stocktronics. What do you make of it?"

"It's a tech company," Laird said, scratching his head. "No business with us, so far as I know."

"I'll have someone look into it," the squad leader replied, as he set the robot down. "Good luck with your hostage situation."

"Uh, yeah." Eastman sidled closer to the robot. "Okay, buddy. You want to take us somewhere?"

The robot remained inanimate for a moment, then beeped and tilted its mangled head. It seemed to regard the two officers, and then it turned and marched out of the room.

Eastman's stomach had been right after all. Just when he thought he'd seen everything New York had to offer, he was reminded how wrong he was.

A lot of other people were similarly reminded that afternoon, as the little parade of one robot and two police officers proceeded through the streets. Eastman was fairly certain the spectacle caused a couple of traffic accidents, or at least a little extra gridlock. He ignored the stares, reminding himself that he was an officer in the line of duty.

They walked several blocks, into the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, and then the robot led them down a culvert so narrow and well-hidden that Eastman could have sworn he'd never seen it in nineteen years of patrolling this precinct.

He had certainly never been where it led.

He squeezed through a broken gate - his partner squeezed more - and found himself in a place so filthy and miserable that even the homeless had forsaken it.

It must have been a part of the city's sewer system. It was dark, running with putrid water, and choked with garbage. The robot marched on as Eastman fumbled for his flashlight. He took one look at the scene, pulled a handkerchief over his mouth, and thought of his pension.

The first time he slipped and nearly fell, he decided the pension wasn't worth it. The second time, he turned back.

"Forget what the robot said," he griped. "This _has_ to be a joke."

The robot honked at them, as if disagreeing, as Eastman tried to squeeze back past his partner. "Hold up, Kev," Pete said, in his endlessly patient way. It had probably saved their butts more than once, but it sure did get annoying. "I think we'd better keep going."

"Going where?" Eastman asked. He glanced back at the robot, which had apparently realized it was no longer being followed, and had stopped to wait for its errant charges. "There can't possibly be anything at the end of this tunnel. Except maybe death."

"Except maybe a woman being held hostage," Pete corrected.

Eastman grumbled under his breath, but turned around to resume the trek. _If we just left Hell's Kitchen,_ he mused, _this must be Hell's Garbage Disposal._ Once he'd had the thought, he couldn't help seeing the robot's toothy jaws as the disposal's whirling blades, and that image didn't make anything any better.

After a few more minutes of slippery terrain, the end of the tunnel was exactly what they found. A rounded chamber, with water dripping into it from narrow gratings along the ceiling, it contained neither imprisoned civilians nor anything imminently deadly.

"Well, now what?" Eastman asked. He wasn't sure if he was talking to his partner or to the robot.

It was the robot who answered. It opened its jaws, but instead of speaking, it pivoted towards one of the cement block walls and began to chew. In what seemed like seconds, it had carved a hole large enough for itself.

Eastman didn't know on what basis he had formed an expectation about what would be on the other side of this hole, but somehow, there it already was. He expected darkness and silence. As he raised his flashlight, he found neither.

Cold light spilled out of the low opening, and there were voices. No - not voices. It sounded like the chattering of birds.

A New Yorker all his life, Eastman could hardly recognize any bird other than a pigeon. He certainly didn't know anything about their calls. But these noises, somehow, didn't sound like what he would expect from a happy bunch of avians. Then again, his spontaneous expectations definitely didn't include birds at all.

More cement fell away, bringing the top of the hole above his eye level, and Eastman realized with dreamlike clarity that he was already in one of those adrenaline-induced time warps where everything was happening much faster than it seemed. The robot, finished with its work, began to advance into the fluorescent-lit chamber. From across the garbage-strewn floor, figures were approaching, lightning-fast and molasses-slow at the same time.

They were chirping and they were howling and they weren't human.

When Eastman reacted, it was partly from training and partly from primal instinct. He dropped his flashlight and reached for his gun, knowing that his partner, just behind him, was doing the same. He identified the targets - four of them - and the civilians, a red-headed woman crouched on the floor.

He emptied the chamber. The shots echoed off the concrete walls, deafeningly loud. When the echoes died away, the four monsters lay motionless on top of the trash.

Three of them stayed that way. The fourth looked straight at him with golden eyes, turned its gaze to the woman, then lay its head down and moved no more.

It was the first time Eastman had shot anyone, and with mounting horror, he realized he had no idea who or what he had just shot.


	4. Chapter 4

April had been working with the Mousers for two years, but, she realized belatedly, she had never heard one chew through a wall.

She was still trying to figure out what that noise was when Donatello leaped to his feet, squeaking loudly. Whatever he said brought his brothers from the other rooms at a run, converging upon the Mouser as it climbed over the rubble it had just created. But before they could fall upon it - and then, probably, on her - two uniformed police officers appeared behind it, their weapons raised.

"No -" April cried out. "No!"

But no one could hear her, and it was already too late. The chamber exploded in noise. The whole thing was over almost before it began, and the Turtles lay lifeless on the floor.

No - not lifeless. One of them turned slowly to face her. It was Raphael, and he uttered a single guttural syllable.

" _Youuuu…_ "

Then his eyes slid closed, and everything was still.

The world seemed to hang in that moment for a long time, and then one of the officers turned his head and spoke into his communicator. "Central, this is squad 54, shots fired."

There was a reply, but April couldn't understand it. Whether the crackling was on the line or in her ears, she didn't know.

"You shot them," was all she could seem to say.

In what seemed like a blink, the taller officer was kneeling next to her, his gun holstered again. "Ma'am, are you April O'Neil?"

She nodded mutely.

"Are you all right?"

"You shot them," she said again.

The officer didn't respond. Reaching into his heavily-loaded belt, he pulled out a type of Swiss army knife. From this he unfolded a small but sturdy-looking pair of metal cutters, with which he began working away at her handcuffs. Over his shoulder, she could see the other officer checking each of the motionless Turtles.

"Hey Kev," said the officer. "This one's still alive."

Her heart leapt and, before she knew what was happening, so did her body. The chains pulled taut and she fell, slamming painfully against the concrete floor as the taller officer only partially managed to catch her.

"Calm down, ma'am," he said, although he didn't sound particularly calm himself.

"Animal Control," the shorter officer was saying into his communicator. "We have a - well, I don't know _what_ we have, but it's an animal and it needs to be controlled."

"No, no…" April said, over and over, and even though it was quiet now, no one seemed to be listening to her. The world faded into a blur as the tall officer released her from the handcuffs and led her away from the underground chamber. There was a walk through the sewers, a police car waiting to take her to the station, and the officer's disbelieving face as he dutifully recorded everything she said about the past days' events. Yes, she wanted to press charges against her former employer. No, she wasn't injured and didn't need to go to the hospital. What had happened to Raphael? To the animal?

They wouldn't say.

There was an official copy of the statement to sign, and another police car, and then she was home. It had only been two days, but she couldn't seem to remember how to function in a normal life.

* * *

It took her months to find out where Raphael had been taken, six years to earn a PhD in herpetology, and weeks of lengthy phone calls to secure an interview at that field's premier research institute.

The interviewer was a kind but irritated woman who looked to be nearing retirement age.

"Dr. O'Neil," she said, as soon as they sat down. "I appreciate the effort you put into your studies and commend you on your degree - your dissertation on reptile intelligence was an excellent piece of work - but the answer, as it was six years ago, is no."

"But Dr. Donahue, I have all the qualifications now," April protested. "I _discovered_ the Turtles. I -"

"Yes, I am aware," Donahue interrupted. "You have also claimed many times that they speak English. Yet Jimbo has never uttered any sound at all, nor displayed any other remarkable behavior, aside from that which one would naturally expect, given his unique physiology."

"His name is Raphael."

The older woman declined to respond to that comment.

"They are _intelligent_ ," April insisted. "Their home -"

"Was a wreck," Donahue cut in. "All that could be said was that Jimbo and his companions had a predilection for collecting garbage. I'm sorry, Dr. O'Neil, but I'm afraid I can't offer you a position at this time."

"At this time?" April echoed hopefully.

"Excuse me, I misspoke. _Ever._ "

"Let me see him," April begged. "I know I could prove -"

"Good day, Dr. O'Neil."

She sat obstinately for a moment, but there was nothing to say. She left before the interviewer had to call security. Having lost her reputation, her savings, the court case against Stockman, and any hope of finding a new job, she was at least going to preserve her dignity.

For all the good it would do her.

* * *

Kathy Donahue drummed her fingers on her desk, then turned to her filing cabinet. Pulling out an overflowing drawer, she withdrew one folder and laid it open on top of Dr. O'Neil's résumé.

Two things about Jimbo's story had never made sense. First, O'Neil had stated - and the police officer's report had concurred - that she had been chained to a wall. Yet there had never been any evidence that anyone other than herself and the four Turtles had been in the underground chamber, leaving open the question of who had handcuffed her. Everyone involved had assumed there _had_ been another person, but that the evidence had been destroyed when the chamber had collapsed, apparently due to O'Neil's Mousers having returned sometime between when she was rescued and when the police went back to investigate the scene of the crime.

Second, the wound on Jimbo's leg appeared to have been caused by the same Mousers, but it was unknown who had so neatly bandaged the injury. O'Neil denied having done so, and nothing in Jimbo's behavior suggested he was accustomed to a human caretaker. To posit a human being who had shown up just before the incident, tended to Jimbo's wound, held O'Neil prisoner, and then vanished without a trace stretched credibility to the breaking point.

But then again, so did suggesting that the Turtles themselves could provide medical care and operate a system of restraints.

Donahue closed the folder and tucked it back into place; it took three attempts to get the drawer to close all the way. For a moment she sat staring at nothing in particular, and then she rose from the wheeled chair and left the spacious but cluttered office.

The elevator was at the end of the hall; she took it down two floors to the lab. The sweltering afternoon promised thunderstorms, and all the herps were in their indoor enclosures. Donahue passed the large habitat of the Aldabra tortoise, and the larger one of the Komodo dragon, and came to the largest of them all.

Jimbo was in his usual posture when she entered: sitting against a wall, knees drawn to his plastron, gaze fixed vacantly on the floor. His injury had healed long ago and when the mood struck him he would move about the enclosure, but like most reptiles he spent a great deal of time completely motionless.

"Where did you come from, Jimbo?" she asked, rhetorically and not for the first time.

The Turtle didn't react.

"Where did you come from… Raphael?"

She thought she saw the slightest hitch in his breathing, the slightest widening of his eyes. But then it was gone, and for the rest of her career she would wonder if it had ever really been there at all.


End file.
